Chapter 4 – Devil
Bang stormed into the training room, furious.
“You little brat, you—”
Before the word “mother” could leave his mouth, Bang’s eyes landed on what was displayed on Qi Qiao’s monitor.
“!”
“What the hell is this?!”
His voice made a dramatic one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn on the spot.
Qi Qiao felt completely numb inside. He stared blankly at the words “Face to Face” on the screen for three seconds, then ignored the flood of question marks filling the livestream chat and decisively yanked out the computer’s power cable.
A forced shutdown.
Bang watched as Qi Qiao smoothly completed the entire sequence, then turned around and stared at him expressionlessly.
“What is it, Captain?”
Bang fell silent, his mind still reeling from the shockwave of what he had just seen.
“Uh… n-no, nothing.” Bang stammered awkwardly.
Qi Qiao expressionlessly packed up his equipment.
“Alright. If there’s nothing else, I’m leaving first.”
Bang: “?”
Suddenly, he remembered something that could salvage a bit of his dignity.
“Hey… wait!” He grabbed Qi Qiao by the arm.
Qi Qiao glanced at him.
Bang silently let go of his arm.
“Tomorrow at 1:30 PM, we’ve got a scrim against the Faith Youth Team. Don’t be late.”
Qi Qiao remained expressionless.
“Okay, got it—”
“?”
At nine o’clock that night, the lobby of the Faith training base was brightly lit.
“The youth team scheduled a scrim?!” Rong Qing double-checked the group chat to make sure he hadn’t read it wrong before looking up.
“No way, Pei. You didn’t mess this up, did you?”
He had gone out for dinner with his girlfriend earlier and had kept his phone on Do Not Disturb the whole time. He had only just gotten back and checked his messages.
And the moment he saw them, he was completely dumbfounded.
Pei Ming sat on the couch playing Tetris.
“No mistake.”
“I was shocked when I saw it too, okay?” Jiang Jiang finally looked away from the variety show he was watching.
“At first, I didn’t understand what Captain meant… but now I get it.”
Rong Qing frowned.
“Get what?”
Jiang Jiang paused the show, then handed over his phone.
Rong Qing saw that it was open to the Weilan TV interface. The number one trending topic read: “Face to Face?”
He tapped into it and saw that the hottest video thumbnail was from Qi Qiao’s livestream.
The screen was frozen on “Private Messages.”
And there, from Faith-Devil, the message— “Face to Face?” —had been zoomed in infinitely.
“So? Get it now?”
Rong Qing suddenly felt a headache coming on.
He already knew about how Monster’s star academy mid-laner had flamed Devil last night, and about the apology this morning, but he hadn’t paid much attention to it.
After all, in all the years Pei Ming had been playing professionally, haters had followed him like a shadow.
But for Pei Ming…
…it never seemed to affect him at all.
But what Rong Qing hadn’t expected was that Pei Ming would personally get involved.
Rong Qing hesitated for a moment.
“Well… Pei, I’m not sure I agree with tomorrow’s scrim.”
Pei Ming glanced at him.
“Reason?”
Rong Qing cleared his throat.
“Ahem… you’ve dealt with haters and trash-talkers for years now, and you’ve never really reacted before. So why are you this angry over this one?”
Pei Ming paused for a moment and looked up at him.
Jiang Jiang could clearly see the confusion in his captain’s eyes.
“Well, what I mean is… this Ghost kid who flamed you—he’s only seventeen. Young and reckless, you know? No need to get worked up over it.” Rong Qing carefully chose his words.
“Besides, he’s with Monster’s Youth Team right now. If you go after him, things could get awkward between us and Monster.”
“I’m not trying to go after him.” Pei Ming set down his phone.
“Huh?” Rong Qing looked puzzled.
“Wait, if you’re not trying to go after him, then why did you use that account you haven’t touched in forever to send him ‘Face to Face’?”
Jiang Jiang looked equally confused.
Pei Ming replied calmly.
“Face-to-face apology.”
Rong Qing: “?”
Jiang Jiang: “?”
Pei Ming added another sentence.
“And while I’m at it, I’ll test his skill level.”
“Wait, what do you mean test his skill level? Captain, you scheduled a scrim with the Youth team!” Jiang Jiang cut in immediately.
“Monster is short on ADCs right now, not mid-laners. Even if he signs with them, he’d probably just end up warming the bench. So what exactly are you testing him fo—”
Halfway through speaking, Jiang Jiang suddenly realized something was off.
Monster lacked an ADC, not a mid-laner.
But they lacked a mid-laner, not an ADC.
“!”
Jiang Jiang’s eyes widened.
“Holy shit! Captain, y-you’re not thinking about making a trade, are you?!”
Jiang Jiang silently counted to three.
Pei Ming didn’t answer.
No answer meant confirmation.
“No way, Captain… don’t do this to us!” Jiang Jiang wailed dramatically.
“That little green-haired trash-talker flamed both me and Ink before too! If he joins the team, won’t that make things super awkward?!”
“And he literally trashed you just last night! He’s your hater!”
Pei Ming put on his headset.
“He’s not my hater.”
Jiang Jiang stared at him.
“How do you know he’s not your hater? When he heard your ID, he straight-up scoffed. It was so obvious, okay?!”
Rong Qing spoke up again.
“If that’s really what you’re thinking… I honestly think you should reconsider.”
“First of all, I watched his stream clips. Ghost is definitely talented. Last season, he ranked number one among mage players on the Chinese server.”
“But judging from his personality, if he really joined our team, I doubt he’d fit in.”
“Second, there’s no guarantee he’d even want to come.”
“And the club already gave me a list of players interested in transfers this season. There are candidates from the Chinese server, the Korean server, and even the European server. All of them already have competitive experience.”
Pei Ming didn’t respond.
He simply said in an indifferent tone,
“We’ll talk about it later.”
…
Qi Qiao had been staring at the private message on his phone screen for thirty minutes.
It was clearly just three simple words.
Face to Face.
But somehow, it all felt incredibly complicated.
What exactly did face to face mean?
An apology?
Was scheduling the academy team scrim because of that too?
Were they finally going to meet tomorrow?
Qi Qiao felt like his thoughts were a complete mess, yet his fingers unconsciously tapped into [Faith-Devil]’s profile page.
There were still only three lonely videos there.
When he had clicked on them before, he had simply hit like, comment, and subscribe in one go, then exited immediately without actually watching any of them through.
Qi Qiao hesitated for two seconds before finally tapping on the pinned video.
It was a highlight clip from the ACR Global League Finals grand finals from three years ago.
Devil playing Odin.
The moment that truly made him legendary.
“The match timer has now reached 43 minutes and 21 seconds. The Chaos Dragon has spawned, and aside from Odin, four members of Faith are already down!”
“If ZR secures the Chaos Dragon here, then this year’s champion will belong to the European region!”
Three minutes earlier, ZR had forced a full team fight against Faith in the bottom lane.
Because of the disadvantage they had accumulated during the early game, even though both teams had already destroyed each other’s towers, Faith was still trailing ZR by a huge margin in gold.
ZR initiated the team fight first.
Their mid-laner landed a massive crowd-control combo on four members of Faith.
In the end, only Odin escaped alive, left with barely half health.
“There’s no minion wave, but that doesn’t matter. All five members of ZR are heading toward the dragon pit.”
“Once they secure the Chaos Dragon, they’ll still have enough time to push the central World Tree before Faith’s four fallen players respawn.”
“It looks like defeat is inevitable. At this point, Devil can only fall back to defend the World Tree and wa—”
“Wait… what is Devil doing?!”
The camera switched to Devil.
Odin, with only half a health bar remaining, was standing silently inside the brush behind the Chaos Dragon pit.
After winning that team fight, ZR naturally assumed Devil had already retreated to the World Tree to defend.
The Chaos Dragon’s special effect allowed the team that killed it to summon a wave of super minions outside the enemy team’s first defensive tower, making it one of the strongest late-game siege tools.
And after securing the dragon, if Devil stayed back at base to defend one more wave, he might be able to stall long enough for his teammates to respawn.
But Devil didn’t do that.
“So Devil is preparing to take a desperate gamble here? A last stand?”
“Looks that way. But if he fails to steal the Chaos Dragon this time, Faith won’t have any chance of turning this game around.”
The five members of ZR noticed nothing unusual.
They were focusing all their damage on finishing the objective as quickly as possible.
The game clock reached 45 minutes and 11 seconds.
The Chaos Dragon had less than one hundred HP remaining.
Just as ZR’s jungler was about to use Smite—
Devil flashed into the pit and instantly stole the dragon with a perfectly timed Purple Smite!
Before ZR’s five players could even react, Odin’s Chains had already wrapped precisely around every single one of them.
Although ZR’s support immediately cleansed the crowd control— it was too late.
Devil blinked forward and unleashed his ultimate. Massive AoE damage exploded across the battlefield. Combined with his passive detonation—three health bars vanished instantly.
ZR’s mage and jungler attacked from opposite sides at the same time, both unleashing their ultimates straight at him.
At that exact moment, Devil—without any vision—threw out Time Spear, then leapt forward.
In a move that was nearly impossible to pull off, he executed a perfect 180-degree flick shot, piercing straight through both ZR’s mage and jungler at once.
The instant all the damage exploded—
he activated Stasis.
[Penta Kill——]
The announcer’s voice rang out across the arena.
A five-kill sweep.
His HP bar stopped at exactly 1%.
Silence filled the venue.
One second later—
“Oh my god, he built a Frozen Heart (Stasis)!”
The entire arena erupted.
Twenty-year-old Devil sat on stage wearing Faith’s black-lettered uniform against a white background.
The slightly damp strands of his wolf-cut hair fell over his forehead, while the sharp contours of his handsome face cast shadows beneath the bright stage lights.
He removed his headset.
His deep black eyes lifted—meeting the camera directly.
Qi Qiao stared blankly at Devil on the screen for three full seconds. Then, snapping back to reality, he immediately turned off his phone. The room fell into complete darkness.
His heartbeat was a little too fast. Expressionless, he glared up at the ceiling before viciously cursing himself under his breath—
“Pathetic.”